Baker Tilly has posted an article and video on several changes the U.S. General Services Administration has announced for the Contractor Assistance Visits (CAVs) performed by its Industrial Operations Analysts (IOAs).

On its website, Baker Tilly says that what amounts to perhaps the biggest change yet, IOAs will review task orders issued under GSA professional services contracts to ensure that the resources performing work on GSA orders meet minimum labor category qualifications, was announced in the fall 2014 issue of “GSA Steps.”

“While this announcement serves as specific notice to GSA Schedule contractors to pay credence to the way the price, sell, and staff their projects, it also speaks to a broader trend that all professional services contractors should be aware of:  the Government is paying close attention to the services that it buys, and the Government’s enforcement community is focusing in on the qualifications of the resources providing those services as well as the pricing of those services,” the firm says on its website.

Read the article and watch the video.

The Atlantic Council has produced a white paper focusing on the water-related issues impacting the United States’ ability to unleash domestic energy resources.

In Produced Water: Asset or Waste, Blythe Lyons  writes that sustainable and publicly acceptable water management practices are essential for both conventional and unconventional oil and gas production. This report, based on a workshop held at the Atlantic Council, promotes the idea that sustainable water strategies require that produced water be considered as an asset rather than as a waste.

“The report reaches the conclusion that produced water is currently seen as a pollutant and detriment to environmental security, but if managed appropriately, it could be recycled and utilized as an asset and new resource in the energy industry,” she writes.

Read the report.

Robert Braun and Stanley Gibson, partners at Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell LLP, have posted a white paper that they developed for Factors and Specialty Lenders to guide them in gaining a competitive edge by using electronic delivery methods, electronic records and electronic signatures.

The white paper is posted on RPost.

In its description of the publication, RPost says a variety of businesses have adopted electronic methods to deliver, accept and store documents and legal notices. The driving force behind the decision is generally the efficiency and lower cost of utilizing electronic, instead of physical, documentation.

“Among the industries that have been reluctant to enter into electronic transactions on a broad basis are factors, asset-based lenders and other specialized financial intermediaries,” RPost says. “Because concerns that arise when moving from paper, fax, and mail to electronic delivery and electronic signatures are real, this paper explores the issues and discusses how a reliable document delivery system with proper implementation of electronic record-keeping and electronic transactions is an effective solution.”

Read the white paper.

Financial Executives International Daily offers public companies some advice on deciding whether and to what extent to give the market guidance about future operating results.

“Every public company must decide whether and to what extent to give the market guidance about future operating results. … There is no one-size-fits-all approach in this area. The only universal truths are: A public company should have a policy on guidance and the policy should be the subject of careful thought,” the daily reports.

The report offers 10 rules for giving good guidance, starting with Rule No. 1: Designate a Limited Number of Company Personnel to Communicate.

Read the story to see details on that rule and the nine other rules, along with suggestions to consider when drafting a guidance policy.

Read the story.

Google and LG have entered into a patent cross-licensing deal, the latest partnership seeking to reduce the threat of lawsuits between major tech companies, reports PC World.

The companies announced the agreement on Nov. 4.

According to PC World, it covers “a broad range of products and technologies” built on the two companies’ existing patents as well as those they file over the next 10 years, they said. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

“The agreement is likely to stave off any potential patent lawsuits between the two companies like the drawn out, costly legal battles that have ensued between Apple and Samsung or Google and Oracle.” the site reported. “Google’s Android OS is in a number of LG smartphones and the South Korean company owns patents covering smartphones, consumer electronics and other portable gadgets.”

Read the story.

Former National Security Agency general counsel Stewart Baker said that Blackberry’s innovative encryption efforts, which Google and Apple are planning to emulate, partially led to the company’s downfall.

He spoke at the Web Summit in Dublin, Ireland.

Reporting on Baker’s address, ZDNet said Baker told the summit that some countries restricted Blackberry’s efforts to market their products because the company wouldn’t fully cooperate with requests to hand over stored data. Those countries included Russia, China, and the United Arab Emirates.

Read the story.

Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith spoke at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society Nov 4, discussing government information requests, ensuring the privacy of consumers and trust in U.S. technology companies.

When governments ask Microsoft for data on the company’s enterprise customers, the company passes the request on to their client. If that action doesn’t resolve the issue, then Microsoft will challenge the request in court. Individual customers don’t get the same treatment, he said.

As reported in BetaBoston, Smith said, “The legal right that governments have to ask for and acquire data about a consumer depends on what the person’s nationality is, and where the data is stored, and where the parent company is headquartered, among other things.”

Read the story.

The Supreme Court heard arguments Monday in a securities class action against pharmaceutical giant Omnicare, asking to what extent, if any, a corporation needs a “reasonable basis” for opinions in its SEC registration statement, reports Courthouse News Service.

Omnicare, the largest provider of pharmaceutical services for residents of long-term care facilities in the United States and Canada, raised $750 million in a public stock offering in 2005, after filing a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But litigation around the offering accused Omnicare of taking kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies to promote certain drugs, and submitting false claims to Medicare and Medicaid.

Omnicare attorney Kannon Shanmugam, with Williams & Connolly, told the court that the company can be held liable for a false statement in its registration statement only if the person who signed the statement did not actually hold the stated belief – regardless of whether it was reasonable, Courthouse News reports.

Read the story.

Loyalty and good communication should be at the top of the list for outside counsel in dealing with their corporate clients, said two panelists in a recent symposium, reports Bloomberg BNA.

David Hecker and Arthur Simon were panelists at the  Oct. 17 discussion “Lawyers’ Professional Responsibilities and Liabilities from Clients’ Perspective,”held  during the 2014 Aon Law Firm Symposium in Chicago.

Hecker is general counsel of the infrastructure group for Peter Kiewit Sons’ Inc. in Omaha, Neb., a construction, mining and engineering company. Simon is general counsel for William Blair & Co., a global investment banking and asset management firm headquartered in Chicago.

They talked in detail about the protection of confidential information and the appearance of conflicts of interest.

Read the story.

Merrill DataSite has posted a complimentary white paper titled “Contract management and business needs: Finding the driving business need in your company.”

The white paper addresses what it will take to finally convince senior management that it’s time to take action. One step is to identify the driving business need in your organization – the next is to demonstrate how improved contract management can support that business need.

What’s tricky is that executives don’t always articulate that driving business need directly. But you can identify it by picking up cues – in executive decisions, priorities and company culture, Merrill DataSite says.

Download the white paper.

A new rule issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration will significantly increase the type of injuries that must be reported to the agency.

A report in The National Law Review says that the new rule will require employers to notify OSHA of any workplace fatalities within eight hours and to report all hospitalizations, plus any injuries that result in amputations or loss of an eye within 24 hours.

The rule will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2015, for workplaces under federal OSHA jurisdiction, The National Law Review reports. OSHA is encouraging States with OSHA-approved job safety and health programs to implement the new requirements by the same date, but employers will need to verify State plan changes or contact legal counsel for more information.

Read the story.

Bloomberg News is reporting that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is investigating whether mandatory retirement provisions at Deloitte LLP violate federal employment law. The investigation could have an impact on law firms that have mandatory retirement ages for their parters.

According to Bloomberg, Ronald Cooper, a partner at Steptoe & Johnson LLP who was a general counsel of the EEOC, said that while it’s impossible to predict the outcome, “the EEOC will probably say that a giant operation that calls itself a partnership where individuals have little or nothing to say about the way the business is conducted isn’t likely to be viewed as an old-style partnership of three or four members.”

As a result, those firms could face liability under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act for forcing out partners of a certain age.

Read the story.

The National Basketball Association players association has hired Gary Kohlman as its new general counsel, according to a report in The New York Times.

Kohlman was lead trial lawyer at the Washington firm Bredhoff & Kaiser, where he represented the Service Employees International Union and the United Steelworkers.

In February, he argued in front of the National Labor Relations Board on behalf of Northwestern’s scholarship football players, who sought the right to form a union, The Times reported. The N.L.R.B.’s regional director ruled in favor of the players. Kohlman also worked with the Major League Baseball players union after the 1994 strike.

Read the story.

Sanofi is one of the world’s top pharmaceutical companies,has fired CEO Christopher A. Viehbacher amid tensions over the company’s international strategy.

The New York Times reported that Serge Weinberg, the chairman, will serve as chief executive until a replacement is found.

Viehbacher focused the French company more on international business. He also was a major force in Sanofi’s embrace of biotechnology, helping engineer the takeover of Genzyme, an American biotechnology company, for $20.1 billion — a deal widely seen as a success for Sanofi.

That acquisition gave Sanofi a presence in the Boston area, a hot spot for pharmaceutical research because of the universities and biotechnology companies there. He made efforts to shift more of Sanofi’s research there and personally moved to Boston this year, the Times reported.

But those actions led to dissatisfaction among labor unions and some government officials in France, who were concerned about a loss of jobs in their country.

Read the story.

The Internet has become so integral to economic and national life that government, business, and individual users are targets for ever-more frequent and threatening attacks, Pew Research reports.

The organization canvassed thousands of experts and Internet builders to share their predictions. (Pew Research called this a canvassing because it is not a representative, randomized survey.)

Its findings emerge from an “opt in” invitation to experts, many of whom play active roles in Internet evolution as technology builders, researchers, managers, policymakers, marketers, and analysts.

One of thekey themes coming from the study was that the Internet is a critical infrastructure for national defense activities, energy resources, banking/finance, transportation, and essential daily-life pursuits for billions of people. “The tools already exist to mount cyber attacks now and they will improve in coming years—but countermeasures will improve, too,” Pew Research reports.

Read the report.

Stephen Dwyer, general counsel for the American Staffing Association, had a blunt warning for staffing companies and employers hiring temporary workers: “OSHA is on the lookout. You are going to be much more susceptible in terms of your contracts with staffing agencies and training for temporary workers,” when he spoke to the Safety Leadership Conference recently.

Dwyer told the conference that OSHA will be examining the contracts between companies that hire contract workers and the staffing companies that supply them, the hazard assessments that are conducted for workplaces staffed with temporary workers and the general safety and site-specific training provided to temporary workers, reports EHS Today.

Ed Foulke,  a partner in Fisher & Phillips, also addressed the conference. He told of one of his clients who drew OSHA scrutiny of safety for temporary workers after a temp was killed on the job two hours into his shift on the first day of work.

Read the story.

Chubb Corp. distanced itself from insurance adjusters in Sudan and Syria after a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry into business in nations blacklisted by the U.S. because of terrorism ties, Bloomberg is reporting.

In a letter to the SEC, the insurer categorized third-party adjusters who examine marine claims as “surveyors” rather than “representatives.” Chubb said that while it doesn’t sell coverage in Sudan or Syria, it has people available there in case they are needed by clients with multinational operations.

“The company is strongly committed to compliance with U.S. economic sanction laws,” Maureen Brundage, Chubb’s general counsel, wrote. Warren, New Jersey-based Chubb doesn’t have any “operations, employees or agents” in Sudan and Syria and hasn’t made payments to entities in either country, she said.

Read the story.

The legal and regulatory terrain has gotten rougher, says Deloitte in a white paper, yet the general counselmust not only keep up, but stay ahead. “Trying to do so with the frameworks, thinking, and tools of the past can be frustrating. It  is may be time to update, to move from giving your organization a sense of direction to providing more guidance and leadership in this area,” the paper continues.

Deloitte’s white paper, The Risk Intelligent General Counsel, provides a fresh perspective on legal and regulatory risk governance and management. This Risk Intelligent perspective recognizes the need to view these risks across organizational silos and to understand their potential impact on the finances, reputation, and future of the business.

Read the white paper.

Compliance and legal challenges are converging, offering opportunity for general counsel to play a more strategic role across the enterprise, reports a new white paper from Mitratech.

The report is titled “At the Intersection of Legal and Compliance: The Opportunity for General Counsel to Meet Increasingly Complex Compliance Requirements and Lower Business Risk.”

As compliance demands expand in both quantity and financial impact, compliance and regulatory issues are at the forefront as a top priority for general counsel, although the role that they play in this function is still evolving, Mitratech says.

“There is a clear opportunity for General Counsel to embrace their role as a change agent within the enterprise and to take a leadership position at the intersection of legal and compliance challenges,” said Martin Goulet, Mitratech’s Senior Product Manager for Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) solutions.

Read the white paper.